Life has continued to be busy in the Brown house! Right now we are in the middle of the semester for both Charlie and Alicia. For Alicia this will be my last semester, and for Charlie it is his first semester. Between work, school, internship, and church callings, we hardly see each other, so we are looking forward to summer break!! In the midst of it all we are extremely focused on getting our food storage despite all the road blocks. With the increasing instability in the world and our nation, we feel a tremendous need to be prepared for whatever the future brings. So....the first hurdles to jump were where do we get the money for it and where to store it!
It was very confusing for us at first to even know where to start with it all, but we finally decided the best way to start would be to get a one year supply of all our life sustaining basics. That way in a worst case scenario, we could at least survive, and in the best case, we can start learning how to use it all, which is ultimately healthier for us anyway! We decided that we would dedicated a large portion of this year's tax return to get all our basics. I know many blogs and food storage specialists recommend NOT buying it all at once...BUT after much thought and prayer, we decided that it was best not to wait or spread it out, especially since we would have the money in our tax return. Of course, if we didn't have the money to do it all at once, we would have had to spread it out since we figured it would cost us about $3000 to get one year worth of the basics for our six member family.
We also decided that in order to continue building our food storage we would set aside a certain amount of money each month for food storage. We looked at our budget and came up with about $100 that we can dedicate strictly to food storage every month. In addition, I have started buying extras of things when I do our bi-monthly grocery shopping. For example, instead of buying the one can of chicken broth I need for our dinner, I'll buy a 32 oz box of chicken broth. I have been surprised at how quickly this has increased our storage, and it hasn't increased our grocery bill. With our $100 monthly food storage we decided to set up what's called a Q at Shelf Reliance. The web site is
http://www.shelfreliance.com/. They have wonderful products and this handy little tool where you can personalize your own food storage plan. Then you set your monthly budget ($100 for us, but as little as $50) and they will automatically send you $100 worth of food every month, from your personalized plan. This has been a great way for us to supplement our food storage and get things we usually wouldn't have in food storage, like freeze-dried fruits, veggies, and even yogurt (yum, yum)! I love their products so much that I have been using them fairly often, and I'm starting to think I need to increase that budget even more. BUT the nice thing is that since I am using it, my grocery bill is actually decreasing! Amazing!! For example, I don't have to buy the fresh onions and bell peppers for our dinners when I grocery shop because I've been using the freeze-dried ones from Self Reliance and they are just as yummy and super easy to use!! PLUS, I often wouldn't use up my fresh produce fast enough, so it would end up going bad and I'd have to throw it away, but the freeze-dried ones last a whole year after being opened (25 years unopened, in most cases), so I'm not wasting food!! It's just a win/win in my eyes, and our food storage has been growing so fast that I'm running out of room in my kitchen. Which brings me to hurdle number two...
Our family has outgrown our home and the thought of finding a place to store a year supply of food was frankly too overwhelming for me. In fact, I have used this excuse since we bought this house, and it is largely the reason we don't have food storage right now. So after we decided to get our food storage, we knew storage space would be a serious problem. We haven't fully solved this problem yet, but we have come up with some good solutions.
First of all, I went through all our cupboards and purged them. I got rid of every extra pot, pan, or dish that I hadn't used in over a year. I figured if I haven't used it in a whole year, I don't need to keep storing it. I was surprised at how much space we cleared up, but it still wasn't near enough. So next we thought maybe we'd store it in our garage, but after doing research on that option I learned that garages are not the best place to store food, because it gets too hot in the summer and will ruin the food. BUMMER!! I have to admit this fact really slowed down my motivation, because I simply couldn't think of where to put our food, and I'm opposed to making furniture out of it, as some blogs suggest.
Eventually we decided to utilize our kitchen better and use our crawl space. The crawl space is not the most convenient place to store food, since we'd have to crawl into our floor to get out whatever we need to use, BUT it offers a good environment for the food (cool, dark, and steady temperatures). So we decided to put all our bulk foods down there on shelves that we purchased. Most of these foods won't be foods we need to get into on a daily basis, so we can just go down there once a month and stock up on what we need. Now, due to the mouse problems (we do have a cat and poison, but we still find mouse droppings from time to time in the crawl space) we do need to make sure the food we put down there is mouse proof. I've found that most of these bulk foods come in mouse proof containers, like plastic buckets and #10 cans, so this shouldn't be a problem. Plus, since we plan to go down there at lease once a month we can keep an eye on it and make changes if there are any problems.
We have also rearranged some things in our kitchen and discovered new places we can store food. So far I haven't filled up the space yet, and thanks to some wonderful suggestions, I think it will take a while before my kitchen space is completely used up. Maybe by then we will have moved to a bigger house?? One awesome suggestion I found on
www.foodstoragemadeeasy.net. It teaches you to make can rotators out of cardboard. Obviously these are not the best quality you could get, but they sure are cheap and work just fine. I think it would make a great Super Saturday craft too!!
Here are some of my favorite links abour food storage:
www.foodstoragemadeeasy.net;
www.everydayfoodstorage.net;
www.thefoodstorageshopper.net;
www.shelfreliance.com;
www.emergencyessentials.com;
Well, hopefully I haven't completely bored you, but I'm glad to pass on some of the things I've learned about food storage, maybe it will help the task seem less overwhelming to you? Either way, my quest continues and stay tuned for my next post about using my new food storage items like wheat and the amazing discovering I made about cornmeal that will save you at least half the money!!
